Trust
is the secret sauce of all relationships. Without trust, drama often
arises so things don’t get done effectively and efficiently. When trust
is low on a team, making decisions takes longer and issues get revisited
over and over and are rarely resolved. Low trust leads to more stress,
less fun and high turnover.

As
best-selling business author Patrick Lencioni notes in his book "The
Five Dysfunctions of a Team," trust is the fundamental element of
teamwork. Teams that don't trust each other don't share everything
that's going on, don't get to learn everything about an issue, and
isolate themselves into silos. In Lencioni's view, no team is really a
team until its members fully trust each other. So getting the trust
issue right is the critical first step for any leader.

Conscious
leaders develop through three stages of trust. Knowing this path and
being able to determine which stage you’re in is a key to self-awareness
and transformational leadership.